Other views: Drone strikes claim America’s best, and worst

Flowers and ribbons adorn a tree outside the Weinstein family house in Rockville, Maryland Thursday. Earlier, President Barack Obama took full responsibility for the counterterror missions and offered his "grief and condolences" to the families of the hostages, Warren Weinstein of Rockville, Maryland, and Giovanni Lo Porto, who were inadvertently killed by CIA drone strikes early this year.(Photo: AP)

Islamic militants in Pakistan regularly prey on civilians who are trying to help ordinary Pakistanis, probably because they’re the softest of soft targets.

Health workers going door-to-door to inoculate children against polio are regularly shot dead, for example. And in 2011, kidnappers snatched an American contractor who was working on farm and dairy improvements for the U.S. Agency for International Development.

On Thursday, President Obama revealed that the contractor, 73-year-old Warren Weinstein, was killed along with an Italian aid worker in what government sources said was a U.S. drone strike in January.

There are important things to say about how that happened, but first it’s worth pausing to honor the work done by people like Weinstein. They work in dangerous places far from home, driven by a dedication to making the world a better place.

In announcing the deaths of Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Porto, 39, Obama apologized for the tragedy. The house where the two were held had been under CIA surveillance for weeks as an al-Qaida meeting place, but the agency never learned that the hostages were inside.

The government also disclosed Thursday attacks had killed two other Americans of a very different sort. Ahmed Farouq and Adam Gadahn were both al-Qaida operatives. One died in the strike that claimed Weinstein and Lo Porto, the other separately.

For the traitors, no tears will be shed. Americans who renounce their citizenship and join the nation’s most committed enemy forfeit constitutional protections.

Nor, in this instance, are there deeper legal issues to be resolved. None of the Americans was specifically targeted, according to the administration, obviating any need for special legal clearance.

Even so, any intelligence failure with such catastrophic consequences is disturbing, and such failings have been a troubling subtext of the otherwise successful drone campaign. They have inspired rage against the U.S. and caused many to wonder whether the tactic is counterproductive.

That is not sufficient reason to stop the drone strikes, simply because they are the best of a series of bad options. Terrorist leaders cannot be left alone to plot and organize in havens. That was what allowed al-Qaida to mount the 9/11 attacks. Striking them with conventional aircraft is even more destructive. And sending in troops is still more deadly to civilians and U.S. servicemembers.

What is not widely known is that strikes have fallen sharply since their peak in 2010, when drones attacked targets in Pakistan alone 117 times, according to the Long War Journal. The Pakistan count fell to 24 last year and five so far this year.

Perhaps that means there are fewer terrorist leaders to target, or perhaps it means that the government is exercising greater restraint. Either would be a marker of progress.

If the killings of Farouq and Gadahn remind us how valuable drone strikes are, the deaths of Weinstein and Lo Porto underscore the tragic price of using them. They should be employed only with the greatest caution.